FRONT ROYAL, VA — Robert Reilly spent years plowing through thousands of pages of turgid narcissism so that you don’t have to.

The result is a truly important book that lays out the template and the timeline for the triumph of sodomy in America, Making Gay Okay: How Rationalizing Homosexual Behavior is Changing Everything (Ignatius Press, 250 pages, 2014).

The book offers a steady stream of common sense, beginning with a consideration of nature, truth, and reality, goods universally acclaimed by Western Civilization for millennia until the rise of the modern Prometheans (Reilly focuses on Rousseau).

With that background, Reilly chronicles the evisceration of nature, truth, and beauty in several contemporary cultural arenas, quietly suggesting that there are more to come.

The study suggests some urgency: Sodomy might sell, but it also kills–its practitioners can count on subtracting twenty years or so from their life expectancy. But that fact seems only to inspire them.

Moreover, sodomy’s practitioners are not its only victims. Reilly details the ongoing sanctification of the “unnatural act” in one American institution after another, to the profound detriment of all of them.

Oh, did I say “sodomy”? Yes, and so does Reilly. All the time.

Reilly believes in calling things by their proper names. After all, it is the act of sodomy that distinguishes sodomites from everyone else.

After all, apart from sodomy, they really are equal.

But these folks don’t want to be “equal” apart from sodomy; they want to be “equal” because of it. And this book explains why.

In their intrepid campaign, strategic vocabulary is indeed vital. In itself, this is nothing new. After all, Stalin wrote a book on the importance of language.

But that was nothing new either. In his Analects, Confucius insists that the first order of business in resuscitating a collapsed society must be the restoration of the proper meaning of words.

And ideology’s first order of business is to hijack them.

In its deliberate and methodical flight from reality, postmodernism flees concrete realities to embrace, and then purloin, abstractions.

To be useful, such concepts must first be emptied of their proper meaning –witness, for instance, “gay,” “rights,” “equality,” and “natural.” Only with their perverted content can they be employed to justify irrationality.

For millennia, the West has considered sodomy to be one of the “four sins that cry out to heaven for justice.” That used to be a pretty big deal. But “sin” and “heaven” have fallen out of favor these days; and justice, as Thracymachus told Socrates, is merely the law of the stronger.

Reilly’s study makes no reference to religious doctrine. “I make no case for religion or revelation in this book,” he writes, “only from reason, as it discloses to us the Nature of things.”

He argues that recognizing sodomy’s senselessness requires not a religious conversion, but only intellectual honesty.

Reilly begins with a welcome and cogent review of the history of Western Civilization’s intellectual patrimony. He compactly and lucidly traces the ingredients of a good society and places them in their modern context.